Two assessment systems will be offered to the students in this course: Continuous Assessment and Global Assessment. Regardless of the assessment system chosen, the pass mark for the course is 5 out of 10. Below the characteristics of both systems are detailed.

Continuous Assessment

The student must carry out 5 assessment activities that can be divided into 3 groups:

• 2 practical exercises (practical assessment). These exercises are done by pairs, achieving both members the same score. Each exercise has the same weight and their mean corresponds to the Grade of Practice (GPractice).

• 2 assessment activities related to the development of a project (project assessment) carried out by a group of 3-4 students. The first activity involves the presentation of the project proposal and has a relative weight of 0.4. The second activity concerns the assessment of the project elaboration, for which "work packages", individually coordinated by each group member, will be defined. Each activity is evaluated according to a predefined rubric which includes elements of group evaluation (e.g. level of innovation of the proposal, degree of utilization of techniques discussed in class) and elements of individual assessment (e.g. quality of the exposition, achievements in the assigned "work package"). The weighted average of these activities corresponds to the Grade of Project (GProject).

• 1 theoretical examination (theory assessment). The score of this exam corresponds to the Grade of Theory (GTheory).

The student must obtain a minimum grade of 3.5 (out of 10) in each of the groups to pass the course. As long as this condition is met, the final Mark (M) of the student is the weighted average of scores in each group, based on the following relation:

      M = 0,35 * GTheory + 0,35* GPractice + 0,30 * GProject

If the student has not achieved a score of 3,5 in any of the groups, the final Mark will be the minimum between 4,9 and the value obtained according to the above relation.

In addition, the following rules must be observed:

• A student who does not submit the report for the first practice will be considered to have chosen the Global Assessment modality. On the contrary, if he/she presents this report will be deemed to have opted for the Continuous Assessment modality (and he/she may not appear as "No Presented" in the transcripts). At the end of the first practice, the student will have chosen one of the modalities of assessment, not being able to change it subsequently.

• The continuous assessment activities are not recoverable. That is, if a student does not attend any of them at the scheduled date, the faculty has no obligation to repeat it.

Global Assessment

Students who choose the Global Assessment system shall submit the software and the report of a project whose functionality, scope and formats will be agreed upon with the faculty (at least one month prior to the delivery date). In addition, the student must take a written examination that includes both theoretical questions and problems and practical exercises. The date of the examination and delivery of the project will be established on the School Board and officially communicated through appropriate channels.

The final Mark in this assessmente system is the harmonic mean of the scores obtained in the examination and in the project.

Extraordinary exam

The extraordinary exam will be governed by a procedure similar to the Global Assessment system. Thus, the student must submit a project and take a written exam. The final Mark is the harmonic mean. However, if the student had a score in the ordinary exam higher than 4 in the project (whether by continuous or global assessment system) he/she would not be required to submit a new project and he/she would keep the previous score. When submitting the project report and software, the valid score will always be the mark of the new submission. Similarly, if the student had a score higher than 4 in the theoretical part of the global assessment system or a score higher than 4 considering the unweighted arithmetic mean of GTheory and GPractice of the continuous assessment system, the student may waive the exam, in which case the score of the theoretical part would be the previously obtained (either the global assessment exam score or the unweighted arithmetic mean of GTheory and GPractice of the continuous assessment).

End-of-program exam

The end-of-program exam will be governed by a procedure similar to the Global Assessment system. 

None of the marks obtained in the course will be retained for subsequent courses.

Plagiarism is regarded as serious dishonest behavior. If any form of plagiarism is detected in any of the tests or exams, the final grade will be FAIL (0), and the incident will be reported to the corresponding academic authorities for prosecution.